About Marginalia

Conditions for Community

October 25, 2026

A poem written to answer half of a question, “What are the essential conditions that make community possible, whose absence or removal makes community impossible?” The answers come from medieval monastic sources, as recovered and elaborated by Ivan Illich.

Detail from a reproduction of a fourteenth-century manuscript. Brussels, Royal Library (KB) 19.295–97, fol. 2v.

Conditions for Community

There must be a threshold to cross to a place of invitation.
There must be a candle for the absent one, like the fifth cup
for Elijah. You must share a common meal and sit face-to-face,
waiting to receive your own image in the gaze of another.
This patient listening might form trust, a conspiracy of peace,
between Radhošť and Radegast, the mountain and the god.
Welcome can cultivate a seedbed for conviviality, eudaemonia,
good living — but only grow if you can receive yourself
as the gift of someone who has read you and written over
your story, marring your self-conception, that puppet drawn
from the flow of your life, how you wish to be seen.
If you can let yourself be distorted by love,
if you can suffer your friends suffering you,
if you can receive, then may dead worlds live again.